Truth Hurts, Little Girl
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: A sort of musical tribute to Labyrinth lyrics through Jean Grey's looking at her life from different time frames.
1. Truth Hurts, Little Girl

AN: Placed somewhere mid the late 03' - early '04 run, right before Jean's latest death.

~*~*~

Sometimes Jean thinks that the more she keeps things running smooth, the more she knows it's just that she's missed the crack that will eventually break it all apart. Like the flow of her orderly work will result in the chaos of the future, unstemable and unstoppable, just a balance fulfilling it's creation.

She's the head mistress of a school she can walk through without even thinking or looking at it. She's a teacher to thousands of students who spend most class periods worried about dying more than passing. She's wife to a man who's no longer at her side.

Jean knows Scott's cheating. She knows it the way his mind retraces his other woman's body and her voice lingers in his ears. He hasn't allowed himself the transgression of sex though. He's too uptight and correct for that. He'd leave his wife and abandon his son to see a dead love, but he couldn't cheat on either of his wives with the women he decided to love or want more. He had only that last inch of pride, or wisdom, or stupidity, left in him.

Like in the dark at night, next to the body of the woman who wore a matching ring to his, he could tell himself he 'really' hadn't done wrong. That he hadn't 'really' stepped outside the rules, once called vows.

They didn't talk when he returned from the encounter with apocalypse because he didn't want to. They don't talk now, because she's not sure what would fall out if opened her mouth, like she told Lucas The Phoenix can *only* speak the truth.

Maybe that's the reason she's so quiet lately. Maybe she's afraid what truth will come if she opens her mouth for more than to run the school, to teach the students, and to defend with all her heart the only life she's got and loves. Because then maybe she'd find out things she's wondered for years about herself, about others and how they affected who she is.

Maybe she could stand in the mirror and remove all the illusions they've heaped on top of her till it drowned her rings of fire. All but adoptive daughter, A student, right hand of the most powerful mutant, proclaimed to overcome his limits one day. The only girl on a team, perused to the point of insanity and oblivion, that positioned changed to den mother like a society switch. Replaced by two cloned life forms, who each engaged or wed the same man as her, and though dead still inhabit her mind. Three children who call her mother but none from her womb.

She's been the weakest one, the strongest one, the sanest one, the craziest one. She's been the nurturer and the dependant. They want all this of her and more. That was what Apocalypse wrote about her in his Manifesto and it strikes a chord in her deeper than she'd like to admit. She's been so many things for so many people.

And standing before the mirror in the dark as the lights licks across her skin she wonders who she'll be when the fire has finally burned away all the masks she wore for them...and it's just her.

Will they even recognize her then?

Or will the familiar husk be all they know?


	2. No One Could Blame You, For Walking Away

Section: Part 4-ish (Yes, I know I skipped a few parts)  
AN: Placed somewhere mid the late 03' - early '04 run, right before Jean's latest death

The inevitable question in everyone's noisy eyes when Scott's affair came out was whether I'd, of course, turn to Logan. It's like being slingshot between men. Only certain people actually look to me to see where I'm going and what my course is. That remember to check in and see if where they think I'm going or that I'm doing is what actually is.

They think my relationship with Logan is all about wild attraction and rough sex. And that Scott was just the thing in the way of being utterly consumed by him. Sounds like a great romance novel back cover, but romance novels are rarely real life. I can't say I haven't been drawn to either of those things, but their not what keeps me going back to him. When I do. Mostly its about no-strings-attached love and acceptance.

Without being crass or rude, Logan's spent many years beneath any of the ideals of anyone. For shady sections of the government in both America and Japan. He's lived longer than most can count and killed more people than most will know in a lifetime. And he admits to these things with his chin raised and his eyes enflamed. He doesn't back down in admission to his past.

It's just that; his past.

And when he looked at me when I was younger I mistaked that for so many other idealized things that only when I was older did I understand. He took me as I was. With Scott there's a need to be on control...emotionally, mentally, physically. He needs someone to take the reigns and lay him down without fear. With Logan he accepted long before I saw it, what I hid away for years and grew ashamed of even showing a ripple of.

To him these things weren't a burden. They were just part of me. The emotional confusion. The fight between the need to be myself and the subjection to being their princess. The issues of emotional confusion where my life is so based in my mind and what I can do with it. There's unconditionalness in the way he looks at me. Like I could be his or not be his and from where he's sitting his opinion will never change. He's just looking at me. At Jean. Not Scott's wife or the Professor's protégé. Not the Headmaster or the Phoenix.

Just Jean.

And maybe I learned that from him. Maybe that's why as I stared at the broken, orphan universe in my hands after I died this last time; the tear fell down my cheek. I watched Emma and Scott standing my grave and felt the shadow that being alone would cause on Scott, as I looked at the twin paths of the universe based on that one moment in time. And I laughed. Not cruelly, mind you, but like I'd finally seen something I'd been missing.

The tear falling down my cheek, I smiled and laughed. And I wished him to live. To love her. To embrace the future. Because maybe Logan taught me that, and I could only truly see if after I'd finally died and risen as the white-gold Phoenix for real this time.

Live.

Just Live.


End file.
